Capital, Punished
Located 350 km (217 miles) southeast of Puerto Rico, the British island of Montserrat is sometimes called 'The Emeral...
Jun 10, 2021
Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet
Short-form objects of fascination from the editors of Damn Interesting.
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Episodes
A Taste of Italy
In the mid-1800s, Italy was consumed by two parallel fights: one to rid itself of Austrian domination (a holdover fro...
May 14, 2021
Pushing the Envelope
As is often the case with people in dangerous professions, the Apollo astronauts found that life insurance policies w...
Apr 14, 2021
The Comforts of the Throne
In the days when hunting was a more common pursuit than it is today, those involved in the job cultivated a taxonomy...
Mar 18, 2021
The Anticipated Future of the Moon
When the Earth was young, shortly after the moon formed, our planet was spinning so fast that a day was approximately...
Feb 15, 2021
A Grubby Niche
It is down to geological and evolutionary happenstance that there are no monkeys on the island of Madagascar: a fact...
Feb 01, 2021
Haydn and Seek
It can be tough to give the boss a hint, but it was even more difficult back in the days of domestic servitude when t...
Jan 25, 2021
It Makes One's Head Swim
On 17 December 1967, Harold Holt--at that time the Prime Minister of Australia--decided to go for a swim. He and his...
Jan 20, 2021
Buzzing on the Green
Popeye the Sailor is well known for his penchant for spinach, and the popularity of the character led to generations...
Jan 12, 2021
A Day on Venus
Compared to Earth, our astronomical next-door neighbor Venus is 95 percent as large, 28 percent closer to the sun, an...
Dec 16, 2020
The Trouble with Triples
What do the American bison, western gorilla, and Eurasian eagle-owl have in common? One answer is that they are all s...
Dec 07, 2020
It Belongs in a Museum
In January 2010, two journalists knocked on the door of 84-year-old Frenchman Jacques Bellanger to ask him about the...
Nov 23, 2020
A Wealth of Insight
At the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, social psychologist Paul Piff paired off approximately 200 u...
Nov 16, 2020
The Unknown Father
Alois Schicklgruber was never quite certain who his father was. Born in 1837, Schicklgruber was the child of Maria An...
Nov 09, 2020
The Overlooked Amendment
"Article the Second" was a single-sentence amendment written by James Madison in 1789, intended to be added to the Un...
Nov 02, 2020
One Small Step for a Man
During the development of the Apollo moon missions in the early 1960s, the newfangled government agency called “NASA”...
Oct 26, 2020
Half a Thought
The smallest denomination coin ever circulated in the United States was valued at five milles, equivalent to one 200t...
Oct 19, 2020
Let Us Be Joyful
Laßt Froh Uns Sein ("Let Us Be Joyful") is a short musical canon in B-flat major for six voices, written by the celeb...
Oct 12, 2020
It's Not Rocket Science
One of the most dramatic surgical procedures still performed on human patients is the hemispherectomy, or the removal...
Oct 05, 2020
Misguided Missiles
In April 1929 in the town of Naco, Arizona, the Cristero War was raging just over the border in Mexico. Rebels in tha...
Sep 28, 2020
Signs and Space
Sign languages rely on the use of space (locations, motions, and handshapes) to express meaning or grammatical nuance...
Sep 21, 2020
During the Dark Times
In the European theater of World War 2, as early as 1943, the German Army deployed a small number of special Panther...
Sep 14, 2020
For Your Eyes Only
In the midst of World War II, the British Air Ministry began publicly extolling the virtues of carrot-eating. The vit...
Sep 07, 2020
Every Breath You Take
In June of 1965, a 27-year-old gentleman by the name of Angus Barbieri checked himself into the Maryfield Hospital in...
Jan 25, 2019
The Original Ghostbuster
In the early 1980s, a certain Mr. Vic Tandy found himself working for a medical device manufacturer in Warwick, in th...
Aug 14, 2018
Involuntary Indefatigability
Only one fictional character has ever been honoured with a front-page obituary in The New York Times: Hercule Poirot,...
May 21, 2018
Scraping Bottom
When Germany was divided in two after the Second World War, military leaders recognized the need for liaison between...
Mar 19, 2018
The Mystery Lake of the Himalayas
Nestled in a valley high in the Himalayas in northern India is a small lake named Roopkund, known locally as Mystery...
Feb 19, 2018
Echoes of NASA
On 13 May 1960, a NASA Thor-Delta rocket carried the agency's new Echo 1 satellite into a 1,000 mile orbit around the...
Feb 12, 2018
Water Proof
In 1936, Russian scientist Vladimir Lukyanov was confronted with the problem of devising a system to improve the qual...
Jan 22, 2018
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